Posted on October 5, 2015

How does one govern an organization? The word govern derives from the Greek word to steer. Today we commonly prefer to say "manage", but manage has a more active and direct connotation. How does one steer an organization?
Steven Blank says that there are 3 phases to an organization: the search phase, the build phase, the execution phase. While strictly speaking each of these phases could be of any size, we most commonly see ...

Posted on September 4, 2015

I recently competed a research binge, the purpose of which was to better understand the life cycle of companies. I started by converging all my past experiences with startups together (written out long form) and then posited some hypothesis about my experiences and the experiences of those I'd talked to first hand. Then I started asking questions and researching each topic. This study included small but important definition questions, such ...

Posted on August 28, 2015

I am not an entrepreneur. I've known this about myself for a long time. I am a builder. The requirements for one who creates and one who builds are very different, and I am the latter. This knowledge has driven me to study as hard as I can to learn how to be the best at building, to learn everything that there is.
Management Systems. Organizational Structure. Policy Frameworks. ISO Standards. SOX and COSO. Corporate Govern...

Posted on June 11, 2015

In my last post I shared my journey leading me back to the epistemological foundation of the LEAN, and therefore DevOps, movements: conceptual pragmatism. While I'm tempted to give you a total recap of the subject, there are entire university courses on the subject, and I'm fairly certain no one will care to read a blog entry sized recap of something so large. Therefore, I shall instead focus on what it means to the world in which we live ...

Posted on June 10, 2015

In the purest sense of the word, I am a philosopher, a lover of wisdom. If I learn something about a concept, I've gained knowledge, but if I learn about a concepts origins I gain understanding, which leads to wisdom. With wisdom I can anticipate behavior.
Deming was a genius, without a doubt, but anyone who knows Deming also knows that he was first and foremost the student of Shewhart. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is the ...

Posted on June 4, 2015

Since before the beginnings of the word "DevOps" many of us have tried to create an adaptation of the Agile Manifesto specific to Operations. All attempts failed. It is now apparent to me that they failed because DevOps was all together a more complex phenomenon than any of us realized at the time. While it is true that we were trying to transform the way Development and Operations had occurred in the past, we were in very green territory, ...

Posted on May 20, 2015

Many people believe that traditional IT Service Management (ITSM) and DevOps are incompatible. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most frameworks and standards for governance and security such as COBIT5, ITILv3, CMMI-SVC, ISO27K, etc, are treasure troves of good ideas. The reason there is such tension between these two camps lies not in the words but rather in the perspectives of the reader. Our perspectives are rooted in our core ...

Posted on November 8, 2014

After more than 8 years, yesterday was my last day at Joyent.
I was asked by David Young & Jason Hoffman to join Joyent in 2006. At the time the idea of "utility computing" was being talked about but "grid" was really the domain of academic super computers for large batch computation. The industry solutions for off-prem computing at the time was either shared hosting (such as what Jason's TextDrive was offering) or buying dedicated ...

Posted on November 3, 2014

We've seen a variety of interesting developments in computing, the astounding success of Docker being the most recent. When I look back across the successes and failures an interesting realization pops out at me: the difference between a good product and a great one is whether or not it service enabled.
Lets use Docker as an example. What makes Docker great? Is it about virtualization (LXC)? That's certainly an enabling technology, ...

Posted on May 12, 2014

In the LEAN and DevOps worlds we're obsessed with the idea of providing value. But what is value really? Some times we use a word so much that it is drained of any practical meaning and becomes more of an abstract idea. It may not be too much of a stretch to say that the word "value" ceases to really contain any value.
Webster defines "value" as:
"a fair return or equivalent in goods, services, or money for something exchanged"
"the ...